Entries in Oklahoma City
(4)

So, I haven't been updating this site as much as I have over the past couple of weeks and today I'm going to try and make up for that by posting so much goodness, you won't know what to do with yourself.

While two weeks ago was a bit of a week off for me, I have been doing many requests and concepts or designs that don't really fit into the larger categories I normally post here.

Take this for example:

This logo is something I came up with a while back upon remembering that my uncle, Charles Brown (no joke), brews his own beer. This was a project of my own undertaking to try and create a logo for a beer and to see if I could do a face logo.

I think it turned out pretty well.

As far as the sports world is concerned, I did this little diddy for an Oklahoma fan:

Returning to something I seem to return to once a month, I have yet again been fooling around with the Oklahoma City Thunder. This time, however, I was recoloring real photos to go with my gray Thunder redesign.

Additional shots can bee seen here and here, not to mention on this fake billboard:

Another personal undertaking was to create a hockey uniform template for myself. Once that had been completed I tested the thing out by making uniforms in case the Blackhawks ever hosted the All-Star game:

That last Hawks-Star concept is of the old Black Alternate the Hawks used to wear. The only problem is that the design is based off of the road uni, not the home. So that, obviously, inspired me to come up with new concepts for the Black Alternate:

But as always, most of the concepts I have done in recent weeks stem from requests for uniform concepts.

A student from my brother's Alma Mater, Fordham University, contacted me to see if I could come up with some uniforms for their basketball and football teams. Now, since my brother left the Bronx, Fordham changed their logo to this, which sucks, so I changed their logos to This, This, This and This.

For basketball, I went simple and classic (with an all gray alternate, per his request):

With the football program, I tried to be a bit more modern while keeping their block F maroon helmet:

But this being a request, the Fordham student asked for some Oregon-esque alternates, spcifically an all black one. While I prefer the all gray (it helps highlight gray as a third color in my Rams concepts plus gray is the new black) the all black is pretty snazzy (if you can get past the Black for Black's sake):

And finally today, we go all the way to 'A Whale's Vagina' to update San Diego State's uniforms:

Home Road

Home Alt Road Alt

Throwback Helmet

That's it for the update. I'm working on some hockey and baseball stuff right now but feel free to send me any more requests.

After a few weeks of feedback from the interwebs, I have taken the most popular of my ideas and the best suggestions and combined them into my final* version of my Thunder rebrand.

Logos

Let's start with a new main logo, the Thunder Ball.

As an homage to the city they used to be from and the team they used to be, the new main Thunder logo incorporates the old SuperSonics logo as well as the new preferred color scheme (gray and black with yellow and red/orange highlights) and the new thundercloud theme. And of course, it's a basketball because apparently all NBA teams have to have a basketball somewhere in one of their logos...

The red/orange behind the cityscape symbolizes an Oklahoma sunset in the distance as the clouds roll in over head.

The new typeface is derived from the Oklahoma state flag, which tries to make up for the loss of the state flag's blue in the color scheme. Many people hated the old Thunder typeface (I didn't but that's just me) but this new type helps to further the correlation between the team and Oklahoma.

The team has also been renamed the Oklahoma Thunder (this was a popular request). However, the cityscape is still of OKC, the town the 'Thunder Dome' still calls home, so there is a bit of compromise.

The secondary logo is the Bison Cloud logo I originally came up with but in the monotone gray/black color scheme and accent colors. I decided not to keep the bison brown so that it would not confuse the color scheme and so it would appear like an image in the clouds.

Uniforms

'Fixing' the typeface and removing the word 'CITY' from the road uniform was pretty much the only change to these uniforms. the logo on the shorts remains the Bison Cloud logo because the Thunder Ball logo doesn't really work as anything other than a main chest logo (think current Golden State unis).

Court

The court hasn't changed much since my last incarnation. The logos have all been updated to their current appearance and the baseline wordmarks has changed to fit the new font and team name.

And with all that, you have yourself a rebrand. Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments.

You would think that since I'm unemployed, my weekends might be pretty lazy. Actually, I get a lot of work done on the days that start with S.

Speaking of S, remember the Seattle SuperSonics? Me too. And since they left for OKC and since people have been noticing that almost every team in the NBA has a basketball in either their primary or secondary logo I decided add a basketball logo into my Thunder rebrand.

So looking back at the Sonics (top right), I look forward to the OKC Thunder (below).

And when fooling around with that design I noticed that the lines on the basketball almost spelled out OKC.

So I made it spell out OKC.

And of course I had to change the court to fit the new logo (and I found bigger versions of the courts).

And here are the logos and court with the black/gray color scheme.

And since I found the new, bigger courts, I went back to Denver and Sacramento and did them again as well.

Next Week

Not sure what is going to be released when but here's a few hints at what I have lined up for next week, until then...

The Thunder's current logo means nothing, signifies nothing and doesn't come close to evoking Oklahoma or thunder.

Failure.

So, being that I have free time and enjoy this sort of thing I took it upon myself to rebrand the Thunder.

Logo

A random basketball, a shitton of colors, two bizarre streaks of color and an 'OKC' that is so oddly placed it's a surprise it's actually a part of the logo. None of that works, none of that screams Oklahoma City and none of that epitomizes or even symbolizes thunder.

So how to correct this? Well, I thought about the thundering herds of bison that used to roam Oklahoma and the west. Herds so large, they would kick up clouds of dust, and that's where my idea takes off:

As you can see, I kept the Thunder font and three out of the four colors they currently use (sorry yellow, there were just too many damn colors). The buffalo head incorporates the theme of lightning bolts and the eyes are the orange/red of the team colors.

Here is just the head and cloud logo by itself.

And here is an alternate logo where the buffalo is at an angle kicking up dirt into the clouds.

Uniforms

And being that I got rid of a color and changed the logo, that calls for a uniform edit - although I really like the current Thunder uniform set. I tried to keep the unis as similar to the current set as possible.

And just for Shits'n'Gigs I created some faux-backs for the Thunder.

Court

And of course, if you change the logo, you have to change the court.

Recolorization

And I figured if we're going to change the image of the team, we might as well take a whack at changing the team colors. I ditched the shades of Oklahoma State flag blue in favor of black and gray - like storm clouds - and the accent colors are red/orange and yellow to evoke lightning, fire and explosiveness.

Logos:

Unis:

Court:

Well, those are my ideas, tell me what you think in the comments.

*If you enjoy this rebrand, please check out my other uniform ideas in my Uniform Concept page. I'm always willing to take critiques, praise or requests.

**Full Disclosure: While I was influenced by Marshall's buffalo logo, I created these logos from scratch using Photoshop CS5.